Only Natural

Researchers at the University of Texas in Austin have developed an algae that could be effective in controlling the mosquito population.…

…Areas of Freedom in Woods County [Oklahoma] are also being evacuated due to the fire burning southwest of the town. The fire is moving northeast.…

A remote and active volcano on Alaska's Aleutian Islands erupted, sending ash 20,000 feet into the air, scientists said.

The U.S. Geological Survey says the Pavlof Volcano, which is about 600 miles southwest of Anchorage and roughly 40 miles from the nearest community, erupted Sunday at 4:18 p.m. local time. Alaska State Troopers could not immediately say if there were any reports of injuries.…

Oklahoma Forestry Services set up a unified command Thursday morning in Woods County in the ongoing effort to battle the Oklahoma portion of the Anderson Creek Fire, which has burned about 625 square miles in Oklahoma and Kansas …

Ceres is a dwarf planet with a bizarre surface, marked by mysterious bright spots that have left astronomers perplexed. Now, these odd features appear to be changing over time, and scientists are left with no way to adequately explain the phenomenon.…

…there remains hundreds of tribes cut off from global civilization, who, in many ways, live as our ancestors did thousands of years ago.… For decades, state and international policy has largely protected these tribes, granting them the right to live their lives in isolation.… In a recent issue of the journal PLoS ONE, Professor Robert Walker, Dr. Dylan Kesler, and Professor Kim Hill argue that no-contact policies should not ignore the well being of the very societies they are designed to protect.… "If populations are small and declining… then current policy approaches should be deemed ineffective…" The trio also insists that the desire to leave cultures isolated is misguided. "In our experiences from interviews with people after contact, there is a unanimous consensus that people stay isolated mostly because of fear of extermination and slavery. People want to trade, particularly for access to steel machetes and axes, and they crave exposure to new ideas and new opportunities. Humans are a gregarious species that intrinsically desire and benefit from outside interactions with other groups."

Amputee Dennis Aabo Sørensen has made history as the first person to regain real-time sensation of touch using a bionic fingertip.… successfully recognized the different textures with a 96% accuracy.…

…over the past several years, discoveries have begun to yield some tantalizing clues about the end of the Ediacaran. Evidence gathered from the Namibian reefs and other sites suggests that earlier theories were overly simplistic — that the Cambrian explosion actually emerged out of a complex interplay between small environmental changes that triggered major evolutionary developments.

Some scientists now think that a small, perhaps temporary, increase in oxygen suddenly crossed an ecological threshold, enabling the emergence of predators. The rise of carnivory would have set off an evolutionary arms race that led to the burst of complex body types and behaviours that fill the oceans today.…

But last year, a major study1 of ancient sea-floor sediments challenged that view.… oxygen could already have been abundant enough “for a long, long time before”.… The gradual emergence of predators, driven by a small rise in oxygen, would have meant trouble for Ediacaran animals that lacked obvious defences.…

For the first time astronomers were able to analyse the atmosphere of an exoplanet in the class known as super-Earths. …55 Cancri e is revealed to have a dry atmosphere without any indications of water vapour. …consists mainly of hydrogen and helium.…

…What they discovered was that celebrities who had bored or annoyed looks were showing underlying levels of emotions that are not seen in people who don't have RBF.…

…Some 10,000 years ago a woman in the last stages of pregnancy met a terrible death, trussed like a captive animal and dumped into shallow water at the edge of a Kenyan lagoon. She died with at least 27 members of her tribe, all equally brutally murdered, in the earliest evidence of warfare between stone age hunter-gatherers.

The fossilised remains of the victims, still lying where they fell, preserved in the sediment of a marshy pool that dried up thousands of years ago, were found by a team of scientists from Cambridge University.…

Inpouring rivers of hydrogen gas could explain how spiral galaxies maintain the constant star formation that dominates their hearts, a new study reports.… "We knew that the fuel for star formation had to come from somewhere…"

…three and a half years after discovering that Ötzi was murdered, experts have now found discovered was suffering from a nasty stomach bug. It is this bug which has shed fascinating new light on the migration patterns of prehistoric man, showing that Europe’s first farmers are most likely to have come from the Middle East.…

…This year, more than 5, 000 earthquakes have been recorded and studied in our state. Residents have become accustomed to the little shaking, rattling and rolling. However, experts say earthquakes in Oklahoma will likely increase in magnitude over time. Now, research said it's only a matter of time before we get a big one that will change life for those of us living here.…